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This week I spoke to a company that has bucked traditional trends by growing itself since its 2012 inception to 22M views a month, 6,000 customers and $2M revenue in 2016, without a penny of outside investment or a speck of PR. Their strategy, as an online platform to support technology shopping: to provide “insane value” by making the process of choosing tech products easier with the help of the product review content they publish each day.

Like many startups, Gadget Flow was not the original plan of founders Evan Varsamis, Mike Chliounakis and Cassie Ousta. The three met in college in 2009. In 2012, at age 21, they launched the first iteration of their venture in an apartment—a website of curated ideas for designers and artists. Through sponsored ads and content they were able to bring in several thousand dollars a month while doing work that they loved.

In 2013, they opened a digital agency to help other entrepreneurs with web design, digital advertising and social media. But they quickly realized the best outcome of the agency was the help it provided in funding their primary goal – the growth of Gadget Flow, the site that by now was adding value to tech-loving visitors by pulling product information together from a variety of destinations to create a single evaluation and shopping resource.

Users were enthused by the consistency of the entries and that the site published new reviews every day. Excited by the possibilities, the team began to offer and accept sponsored submissions and banner ads. Twenty signed on their first month. Three years later, the site has achieved $2M in revenue from 6,000 customers, with sponsorships ranging from $280 - $5,000 from clients ranging from Creative Labs and Polaroid to Sony. The company now employs 25 people located all over the world.

Seriously, no PR? Varsamis notes the team has never pursued traditional press coverage. “We’ve gotten a few mentions from Mashable, PC Magazine and hundreds of other blogs,” he says. Press wasn’t the determining factor in the company’s growth. What has worked better is a relentless focus on users, he says. Wish lists. Consistent format for descriptions and articles. Simplified buying—you don’t buy products directly from Gadget Flow, but are redirected to purchase links on the companies’ sites.

Instead, a serious bent on “growth hacking.”Instead of PR, the team has focused on organic social media. They’ve partnered with other companies on give-aways and viral strategies for getting thousands of additional users to perpetually view and subscribe. Contests allow readers to vote for the best products, and the company publishes first about the products that get the most votes. Throughout the site, the messaging is based on strict “value-add”—since the company doesn’t make a profit on purchases, the focus of the material is to expose visitors to the “coolness of the product”—no one is ever pushed or coerced to a decision to buy.

Frugality is cool. While the “unicorn” model of growth espouses foosball, parties and food, Gadget Flow’s growth occurred in the midst of the economic crisis in Greece. Yes, the reality of seeing other businesses closing and jobs being lost was daunting, but it reinforced the team’s resilience in staying the course. While venture-funded organizations tend to make new hires with abandon, Gadget Flow has held out on new hires “to the edge of burn-out” and has spent weeks of evaluation to ensure each new hire is right.

Thought leadership content is king. My first thought about this company was that the overlap and potential competition with large and established product review publications—PC Magazine, Gizmodo, Engadget—must be extremely hard to surmount. In reality, however, it is not the presence of product reviews that has allowed the team to excel as much as the platform, Varsamis maintains. For example, with people's attention spans now as short as eight seconds, Gadget Flow has focused on the speed and consistency of results and on making the process of comparision shopping easy. New additions include partnerships with influencers such as CNBC technology voice Jessica Naziri, now conducting 60-second product interviews via Facebook Live.

The Gadget Flow site has featured more than 4,000 crowdfund campaigns and has helped thousands of emerging tech projects get funded, according to Varsamis, and is planning to create an IoT (Internet of Things) incubator for technology crowdfund campaigns.

What is the endgame for Gadget Flow? I wondered. Might the company be ripe for potentially getting acquired? Several requests have been tendered, Varsamis acknowledges, and all have been declined. “There are still so many things we can do,” he says. “The trends are verifying that what we’re doing is working.”

The next goal is to move the majority of the team from Greece to the United States, and to continue the year over year growth rate that is currently tracking at more than 200%.

The morals of the story, then, according to Gadget Flow's founders, are that there are multiple paths to hyper growth beyond outside capital and traditional PR. A focus on high value-add, customer engagement and an ear to the ground for new trends has taken this company’s early growth to the stars.

I am an entrepreneur and communications expert from Salt Lake City and founder of SnappConner PR. I am the author of Beyond PR: Communicate Like A Champ In The Digital…

I am an entrepreneur and communications expert from Salt Lake City and founder of SnappConner PR. I am the author of Beyond PR: Communicate Like A Champ In The Digital Age, available on Amazon. I am co-creator of Content University, which helps entrepreneurs and executives learn to write and to tell their stories better, and how to use their strong thought leadership content to advance their companies. Content University is available at www.ContentUniversity.com. The opinions I express (especially when tongue in cheek) are entirely my own. My newsletter, the Snappington Post, is available from www.SnappConner.com.